The Thin Green Line… almost there!

Our Knowledge and Innovation products are almost ready and The Thin Green Line team gets some closure after trying to balance stress and creativity on a daily basis, over the past few months.

The Thin Green Line is a challenging project undertaken on by Longfish Productions that asks for Cypriots to “tell their story of romantic relationships or encounters with people from ‘the other side’” in order to develop one of the most unique documentaries in Cyprus, ever.

“The last two weeks were full of energy, creativity and hard work. Rahme and Anthie prepared the scripts for the interviews, based on the original recordings and having been directed to be as faithful to the original as possible. We then emailed the scripts to the actors and we started the rehearsals immediately.

My directions were clear and simple: Do not act! Be as natural as possible!

I already knew how hard it is for stage actors to switch to the camera, but I guess the style of the documentary helped us a lot in this case. Also the fact that there are no faces in the frame gave them the opportunity to express themselves through body and gesture. This physicality is after all one of the main targets of this project!

The shoots were long, difficult but utterly enjoyable! Looking at the rushes just before I start importing the footage on Final Cut I knew there was some gold there. And I was not wrong; it was so difficult to cut bits off… so hard to fit a love story in no more than 10 minutes. But the Goddess of editing helped me through and by the moment Helena had the Fusion Tables of the Thin Green Line Project set, the interviews were already uploaded on Youtube waiting to go live on the Thin Green Line Map!

The Thin Green Line Map is 99% ready and looks wonderful! Blue dots link to the archival footage we got from CyBC and BRT and red dots to the five interviews, the five hot stories that negotiate both the archive as well as our views of the world, our notions of the national, the temporal, the spatial, of gender and, last but not least, of sex itself.

The first big step of the Thin Green Line Project, that is the TGL MAP, will be up and running soon, available on the Mahallae hub! We hope you enjoy it :)”